Although they were not household names like Lennon and McCartney, or Jagger and Richards, the songwriting team of Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard enjoyed a long period of success on the pop charts in the 1960s and 70s, before writing scores for West End musicals and theme music for several TV series, including the BBC’s Miss Marple. They also became the first British songwriters to have their work recorded by Elvis Presley, who took their composition I’ve Lost You into the US charts in 1970 and was also seen singing it in the film Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.
Blaikley, who has died aged 82, had known Howard since they were seven-year-old pupils at University College school in Hampstead, north London. It was 1964 when they made their big breakthrough, when the Honeycombs topped the British chart with their song Have I the Right? Blaikley and Howard had spotted the group, then called the Sheratons, performing in a pub in Islington, and invited them to listen to some songs they had written.
Have I the Right? became an international hit (boosted by its distinctive Joe Meek production and enthusiastically promoted by the DJ Tony Blackburn on Radio Caroline), and sold more than 2m copies.
The duo subsequently discovered Dave Dee and the Bostons at a gig in Swindon, and were struck by the way there was “something of the British music hall tradition about them,” as Blaikley put it. They took over the group’s management and rechristened them Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, and enjoyed 13 consecutive hits with the band, including the feverish Tex-Mex chart-topper The Legend of Xanadu and the operatic Last Night in Soho, as well as Hold Tight!, the innuendo-packed Bend It, Save Me and Okay!
Now increasingly in demand, Blaikley and Howard wrote songs for the Herd, Lulu, the Tremeloes, Horst Jankowski, Engelbert Humperdinck, Marmalade, Rolf Harris and, under the joint pseudonym Steve Barlby, the band Matthews Southern Comfort.
In 1971, their song Heart of Rome (co-written with Geoff Stephens) appeared on Presley’s album Love Letters from Elvis, and was the B-side to Presley’s single I’m Leavin’.
Born in Hampstead Garden Suburb, Alan was the oldest of the three children of Francesca (nee Hall) and Ernest Blaikley. Ernest, nearly 30 years older than his wife, a schoolteacher, had been an official war artist in the first world war and curator of the Imperial War Museum, and was a founder member of the Society of Graphic Art.
Alan gained some early musical experience as a choirboy at St Mary-at-Finchley church. He read classics and English at Wadham College, Oxford, and was reviews editor for the student newspaper, Cherwell.
After Oxford, he joined Howard and another Hampstead school friend, Paul Overy, in publishing the magazine Axle Quarterly (1962-63). In a series of spin-off booklets called Axle Spokes, they covered controversial topics including New Wave cinema, the permissive society and pop music. Blaikley’s contribution (under the pseudonym Anthony Rowley) was Another Kind of Loving, an essay on homosexuality, which was then still illegal in the UK.
In 1963-64 he was a trainee producer with the BBC TV talks department, and worked on the current affairs programme Tonight, presented by Cliff Michelmore. It was in 1963 that Blaikley and Howard began writing songs in earnest, though Blaikley recalled that they had first written a tune together in 1954. Titled The Yellow Dance, it was recorded on to Howard’s father’s Dictaphone.
Howard, whose mother was a concert pianist, observed: “Alan and I have known each other for so long that we have developed an intuitive empathy that allows us to shortcut the creative process.” Blaikley added: “The creative process requires a temporary suspension of one’s critical faculties. A bit like being in a trance, and the mood must not be broken.”
Their working methods allowed them the flexibility to tackle numerous genres. In 1969 they masterminded the concept album Ark 2, a science-fiction story inspired by the 1969 moon landing. It was credited to the band Flaming Youth, and has gained cult status by virtue of being the first major-label recording by the drummer Phil Collins, who shortly afterwards joined Genesis. Though it was a commercial flop, the Sunday Times made Ark 2 its rock album of the year.
Blaikley and Howard were bold enough to write gay-themed songs, for instance Do You Like Boys for the UK pop duo Starbuck, and all the material for Peter Straker’s album Private Parts (1972). “The album is very personal,” Straker told Gay Times. “I discussed everything with Ken and Alan. We tried to be explicit – as explicit as Jacques Brel.”
Their first stage musical, Mardi Gras, ran at the Prince of Wales theatre in 1976 and featured a book by Melvyn Bragg. Their next effort, an adaptation of Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, was staged at Wyndham’s in 1984.
They also wrote a pair of musicals for BBC TV, Orion (1977) and Ain’t Many Angels (1978), and created music and lyrics for the touring version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1990). Television work included music for two 80s drama series, The Flame Trees of Thika and By the Sword Divided, as well as Miss Marple, played by Joan Hickson, starting with The Body in the Library (1984).
Blaikley had a keen interest in psychology, and he and Howard wrote the music for the album Life Before Death (1978), a collection of poems performed by the psychiatrist RD Laing. Encouraged by his own analyst, William Kraemer, Blaikley trained as a psychotherapist and from 1981 ran a private practice from his home in London for more than 20 years.
From 1978, his partner was the translator David Harris, with whom he formed a civil partnership in 2007. David died in 2015. Blaikley is survived by his brother, Paul, and sister, Marian.
• Alan Tudor Blaikley, songwriter and composer, born 23 March 1940; died 4 July 2022
